A Rocker Looks for His Dad's Legacy

Communication breakdowns between father and son is an old story going back to the Bible, "East of Eden," to a bunch of Springsteen songs.

In fact the rift seems played up especially in rock songs, as it had for E, the frontman of the band the Eeels who decided to posthumously patch things up in an intriguing episode of "Nova" airing tonight called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives."

Just as E was trying to fight obscurity in the rock world (where he has certainly found cult acceptance), so did his father Hugh Everett, uncovering groundbreaking theories in parallel universes, which most people at the time dismissed.

As a teen, it was E, then known as Mark Oliver Everett, who found his father's body, dead at 51 in 1982. And now, a generation later, he sets out to find out more about his father and his theories from colleagues who knew him and students who revered him and scientists able to explain it to him.

It's also a way to get close to a man he never felt particularly close to, E said at press tour in July.

"I think it is a common thread with a lot of families, that fathers and sons have their issue and maybe don't always connect," E told me at press tour. "But we didn't connect at all. I mean, it was sort of shocking the degree of how isolated he seemed to me, growing up in the same house with him all those years."

It could have been his brilliance that set him apart from not only his family but society at large as well. "How do you relate to the rest of the world when that's what's going on in your mind?"

As he got older, the rocker said he became more interested in his father, in part because he noticed some of his traits in him.

"You look in the mirror one day and you see your father looking back," he says. "It helps you to sort of identify with him and let him off the hook for his shortcomings as a father."

When he was approached by a BBC crew to do this personal investigation, it "was just an extraordinary process for me," he says. "To have a father that you didn't know at all and then to be able to be working together on something like this, it's just -- it's probably the single most life-changing thing I've been through."

It also lead to an accompanying memoir out in bookstores today taking the title of one of his songs musing about his father, "Things the Grandchildren Should Know" (St. Martin's Press).Through it all, he learned in what high regard his father, so distant and hard-drinking at home, was held by others.

"Hugh Everett was a great hero of mine going way back," says MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, who places him among Newton and Einstein in importance.

Quantum physics and math weren't big for the son, though. "I flunked out of the easiest ninth-grade geometry in high school," E said.

But he added, "I'm not bitter about not being a mathematics genius at all. I'd much rather be a rock star. The groupies are a lot better."

"Nova" airs tonight at 8 on PBS.

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Roger Catlin is TV critic for the Hartford Courant and writes a daily column about what's on television called TV Eye. He is also on the board of the Television Critics Association. Before all of this, he was rock critic ... read more